Stephen R. Covey: SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE : Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Thomas L. Friedman: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Seth Godin: Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Tom Kelley: The Art of Innovation : Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence : Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
Stephen Denning: The Springboard : How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations
« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
One, from my friend Joe, was to Straight Bourbon, an excellent site for all-things bourbon. The other, from my colleague Bob, was to an Ad Age article about Jim Beam's efforts to shift its marketing focus to more word-of-mouth.
So my friends think I like bourbon or something. ; ) Thanks guys.
We have the privilege of managing the largest single-day fund raiser for breast cancer in the world: Lee National Denim Day. We started the program, along with our client, Lee Jeans, 11 years ago.
Last year we experimented with some social media communication to help spread the word about this campaign. This year, we've expanded those tactics significantly:
Team pages on the Denim Day site allow groups of people to manage their own mini-campaigns and socialize their experience. I joined Mariska Hargitay's team (she's our lead ambassador this year). We've also created a YouTube channel, a cause/group on Facebook, and a MySpace profile.
Denim Day is October 5th, so we'll be rolling out more efforts as we get into the last month of the campaign.
2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the publishing of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm a big Kerouac fan. I've read most of his books. On The Road was a milestone piece of work in American Literature, and it's impacted millions of people.
I didn't discover it until my late 20s. Kerouac was one of many great beat writers I read at that time in my life. I'm glad I was older when I read the book. I think I had a different appreciation for it than I would have had I read it when I was, say, an impressionable, hormonal, angry, searching-for-meaning-17-year-old. I appreciated it for its poetic aesthetics, not just the story.
I compiled a short Trailfire for anyone interested in diving deeper into the book and Kerouac.
Mike Manuel's wisdom came through in spades in this post. The killer line:
"...knowing how to distribute something so it's "findable" is a small tactical fix, but knowing how to create something that's "shareable" is a big strategic advantage."
If I can put an even finer point on it: "Think. Then do." Strategy is thinking. Tactic is doing.
I can sense the irritation in Mike's post, and I share it. Social media has become more pervasive in client conversations, but the thinking behind why (or if) we should do it hasn't caught up to the hey-let's-do-something traditional mentality. Therefore, it gets minimized to a bunch of "attention getting" tactics with no meaning. No strategy.
Think. Then do.
technorati tags: strategy, viralvideo
So I'm sure I'm late to the party in finding Add This, but I'm testing it out. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the button on the end of every post automatically (somewhere in Typepad is the "advance templates", but all be damned if I can find and edit them). So I'm simply saving the HTML on an Outlook Note and will copy and paste it into each post.
technorati tags: addthis
I don't watch much TV. But my colleague, Andy, said I should check out Mad Men on AMC. It's a show about an ad agency in the 60s. Love the production value/creativity, but man, it's depressing!
All I can say is, I'm glad I wasn't an adult in the late 50s/early 60s. This show has completely destroyed my clean-cut fantasy of the ad world during its hey-day. If that's the way everyone acted on Madison Avenue...whoa. Women in their place (the home). Children in their place (seen and not heard). Account Executives in their place (buying the client booze and hookers). Creatives in their place (coming up with all the ideas). And cigarettes and hair-gel everywhere. That's the same industry I work in! (I do envy the whisky-at-work lifestyle, however.)
The show reminded me a little bit of Glengarry Glen Ross. I couldn't finish that movie...it was too dark, too depressing. I got that same feeling after watching last night's episode of Mad Men.
All I can say is, Don Draper is no Larry Tate. I think I'll skip the show so my fantasy is left in tact.
If you know me, you know I'm a whisky fan -- bourbon specifically, but I like to try different scotchs as well. I'm no connoisseur, just a fan.
I recently discovered Whiskycast, a podcast from journalist and whisky fan Mark Gillespie. I love it. He focuses on whisky news and interviews with industry insiders, as opposed to tastings, ratings, etc. He also has links to other whisky-related information.
If you're a brown-spirits fan, check it out.
technorati tags: whisky, whiskycast, bourbon, scotch
I'm in the land of smog and stars today for a meeting with our Breast Cancer 3-Day marketing partners, RadarWorks and Event 360. I'm staying in this cute boutique hotel in West Hollywood called Farmer's Daughter. They've taken the whole farm-thing and farmer's-daughter thing to the nth-degree, from their website to the room decor to the logo. It's nice to see the naughty farm-girl fantasy is still alive and well in a place were reality is optional.
But what is really on my mind is water. I read a very disturbing article about bottled water in this month's Fast Company. And as I brushed my teeth this morning and watched the water run down the drain -- water that came from somewhere in Northern California because LA doesn't have enough here -- I was reminded of the issue of water conservation again.
Having grown up living over the largest underground aquifer in the United States, but one of the most arid regions as well, water was always on our minds. We've never irrigated on our farm, so our farming practices were always about conserving water. And now my family, like other Western-Kansas farmers, has taken that practice to a new level with "chemical farming." Because ground moisture is so important and so limited (they're in their 5th or 6th year of a drought out there), you can't even disturb the ground by plowing it. Instead, to kill weeds (which suck up water), they use chemical.
I don't know if that's good or bad. Right now, for them to survive, it's just necessary. And farmers are nothing if not adaptable. And at the decreasing rate of rainfall out there, the Ogallala Aquifer isn't replenishing the millions of gallons of water taken from it for farm irrigation. So I'd rather they chemical farm than irrigate.
So the world seemed pretty connected this morning from my little farm-themed hotel room with bottled water in the mini-bar in a water-starved city.
An informative blog post from ePluribusmedia about the kick-off Breast Cancer 3-Day event in Boston. My friend, Jenne, is the national spokesperson for the event this year, and her post about her first experience is outstanding. It's hard to describe...you have to do it to know what it's like to be a part of this community of people...people that have gone the furthest you can go -- 60 miles and at least $2200 each in funds raised -- in the fight against breast cancer. If you're up to the challenge, I encourage you to check out the site. Yes, the Breast Cancer 3-Day is a Barkley client (we manage and execute the public relations for the event), but I'd promote it even if they weren't.
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